Power cut and exchange 2003

[MrWu]

Hi guys,

News years eve and given the happy news that the school and the surrounding area had a power cut today.

Long story but i have joined as a network manager for a a few weeks, the Exchange 2003 Server and any other server has no UPS (plus looking at the event viewer previously that the Info Store is corrupted and they haven't backed up for a year!) so i am assuming the worst. Could not get into the school till Tuesday so im planning worst case.

Im thinking of using the dial-tone recovery method by creating a blank database so staff can send receive new emails, then try ESEUTIL to repair the DB and hope in hell it would be ok. Then merge it all back? Would that be good way to go?
I'm hoping when I return to work I boot up Exchange and all will be ok..but hey Im not always that lucky.

Cheers guys and happy new year!

[mmoseley]

Best case: Go in tuesday, boot up the exchange server and its all back and working fine (I have known this happen - So dont dis-may yet!)
Worst Case: You have to use the ESEUTIL tool to do a repair of your DB (And yes again, I have known this to work just fine!)

If you have some money left, I would quickly invest in a UPS and some sort of backup strategy, even if its to a USB HD or a computer somewhere else on the network (In case of fire disaster in server room)

I wouldnt worry to much, but hopefully you get it goin, let us know how you get on!

Mart

[MrWu]

Best case: Go in tuesday, boot up the exchange server and its all back and working fine (I have known this happen - So dont dis-may yet!)
Worst Case: You have to use the ESEUTIL tool to do a repair of your DB (And yes again, I have known this to work just fine!)

If you have some money left, I would quickly invest in a UPS and some sort of backup strategy, even if its to a USB HD or a computer somewhere else on the network (In case of fire disaster in server room)

I wouldnt worry to much, but hopefully you get it goin, let us know how you get on!

Mart

Cheers mate,

Just didn't want to be the new kid that came in and all this stuff has happened lol. I have already built another DC( they havent rebooted the main DC for 300 days becuase it was flaky) created more Global catalog servers( they wondered why Exchange didnt work and no one can log in when their DC went down) sorted the DNS, and started documenting the network(theres no documentation on the network at all)

I have put a proposal for a server and UPS revamp just before we broke up for Xmas, they might take notice now!

Anyway nothing i can do without access to the school, must stop worrying and drink up for the new year!

Happy new year Mart !

[kmount]

Sounds like you've inherited a challenge there.

I'm sure you'll do fine and get past this one and continue the good fight.

[john]

Personally I find EX 2003 very resilient to these kinds of issues, Ive got one in a local charity where it often gets power disruptions (long story) and its been brilliant at self healing. However EX 2010 every single time it looses power the DB is destroyed Hate EX 2010 for that but love many other features of it Keep fingers crossed that its all well

[MrWu]

Funny you should say that john but the ex network manager had put an Exchange 2010 server in but havent migrated the mailboxes from old exchange 2003 server yet.(they had it put in because of the aforementioned hardware probs on the old Exchange 2003 server) i did not do the migration yet because after testing it on my first week it had issues with Frog integration, OWA and Activesync. It looks like a blessing in disguise then that i didnt migrate the 150 users to Exchange 2010 just yet if EX2010 is not so good at power cuts.

The other maybe lucky thing is we have the consultant that they hired for the Exchange migration in for an INSET day for MDT training, looks like some of that might be Exchange DR....

...however things might turn out better than what i predict the worst....

[john]

MDT is a piece of you know what to get to grips with, plenty of people, including myself use it, and there is a thread on here full of hints and tips. Best thing I did was to buy the MDT book that was recommended on here - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deployment-F...5372434&sr=8-1 that was a great book and you can literally go from cover to cover job and follow it step by step and you have a working MDT system

[sukh]

Before doing any repair on the DB, make a copy and do a backup, using the /p can cause dataloss.

Depends on how critical the data is, you can alwaysuse 3rd party tools to extract the data.
With regards to 2010 and DC corruption, not sure how you have this setup or have seen this setup, but you shouldn't have issue with this,

[psydii]

If you've not done a Exchange recovery without backups before I would strongly recommend giving MS Support a call. £200 and they will talk you through it and nothing says 'I'm taking this very seriously' to management like requesting contingency funds to bring in the external professionals before the situation gets any worse.

It also gives you an insurance policy - if it doesn't pan out well for the data, there really is nothing you could have done differently.

Finally repairing a ESE database can take a long time: 9Gb per hour is the hard limit. Always good to get that bit of bad news out the way up front.

https://support.microsoft.com/oas/de...direct=1&sd=gn

[MrWu]

Thanks for all your help guys, just to say i managed to get into the school with the help of the facilites manager, managed to get going all the DCs, Sims server, exchange 2003 and 2010, Frog running. Bar issues with DHCP, iSCSI not reconnecting...these are also solved now. Its also refusing remote access and sending out external email which i presume our managed firewall has gone on a lock down after powercut, they should be on the phone tomorrow morning. A poor casulty of the powercut is our intranet server. Which has gone kaput ...overall i have been very lucky. But i will be monitoring the DCs all week ensure replications ok(it seemed to be when i left)...after chatting to the facilities manager about the setup we had in my old company he is going to quote for a diesel generator too!

[sukh]

Test SMTP outward?
Incoming OK?
Mail in the queues?
Any NDR's?

[MrWu]

Hi sukh,

I had to leave before the school locked up but i discovered:

Cant access RDP to a terminal server from outside, webmail or exchange

When i sent a test mail out to my yahoo ( from ex2010) i get an NDR:

Delivery has failed to these recipients or groups:

Email bkanked out

Your message wasn't delivered due to a permission or security issue. It may have been rejected by a moderator, the address may only accept email from certain senders or anotherrestriction may be preventing delivery.

The following organisation rejected your message: mailxx.xxx.managedapps.co.uk

I have read up this is due to connector between 2003 and 2010( although RDP from outside, owa, mail etc worked before the power cut.

To clarify im the oly mailbox migrated to Exchange 2010 for testing, they had to lockup before i cold test 2003 mailboxes.

We use a sonicwall e5500 managed by a providir, which also holds our mail records.

[sukh]

so sending from 2003 to yahoo works fine?
Do you have a SM|TP connector on 2003 or only a send connector on 2010?

mail flow between 2003>2010>2003 all good?

[MrWu]

Hi sukh,

There is a send connector on ex2003, i will test in more detail tomorrow(as a bonus the consultant who set ex2010 up before i joined the school is here tomorrow for the INSET, so could pick his brains.

Internal email flows ok.

Shame to say did not leave enough time to log on with a ex2003 mailbox and test external mailflow(just had a moment to check the DB was mounted ok on ex2003 my greatest worry) so the NDR i gave you might just be my mailbox.

Unfortunately having no RDP to the terminal server cant check tonight, which makes me think the managed sonicwall isnt happy.

Thanks for the help though sukh. :-)

[sukh]

test tomorrow and post back, a simple telnet test would tell you.